All posts tagged: typhoon

If you want to know how resilient Filipinos are, take the first flight out to Tacloban City in Leyte, an hour from Manila. By this time, everyone–Filipino and foreigner alike–knows the city by name. It is impossible to forget what happened to this place two years ago, during the strongest typhoon in history to ever make landfall. In November 2013, I was one of those who watched in horror, from the comfort of my living room in Metro Manila, as 300 kph winds and a seven-meter storm surge nearly decimated that historic city in Eastern Visayas. A few days later, as the winds blew another way, images of Tacloban revealed nothing but bloated bodies, ravaged houses, crying children, lost parents—the remnants of once happy lives—scattered on the streets. Imagine what I was thinking when a book project required me to travel to Tacloban, 16 months from that tragic day. “Do you think there are ghosts there?” I asked a friend, who knew that I feared only three things in life: big spiders, flying cockroaches …

In less than 24 hours, a tropical storm warning will be raised all over the country again, the alert level depending on where you are. I am in southern Metro Manila, hundreds of kilometers away from where Super Typhoon Maysak is expected to make landfall. BUT where I need to be in three days is exactly where that typhoon will make its second landfall in the Philippines. We had arranged a shoot in the Ifugao rice terraces and an interview for a book project that’s due later this month. The plans had been laid out weeks ago–and then this, a super typhoon. Once again, I am faced with things beyond my control. It’s a familiar feeling. I had similar thoughts last month, when a viral infection kept me house-bound–bedridden half the time–when I had a gazillion things in my to-do list. There was that first out-of-town shoot for the same book, a whole-day workshop to conduct, final papers to submit in graduate school and several stories for editing. Just when the deadlines are looming, you find yourself practically dead. What do you do? In …